James Baehr: Prison of a falling peso

Protesters calling for increased unemployment assistance march past the Metropolitan Cathedral while marching through the city on the day after Pope Francis was elected at the conclave on March 14 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. GETTY IMAGES FILE PHOTO

I am Writing this on a plane flying home after half a year in Argentina. I guess I'm flying from home to home: in another lifetime this was the nation my family called its own. That was before my grandfather stitched all of his money into his coat and boarded a boat with his wife and four children to emigrate to America – my mother a little girl then.

It was after he saw what was happening to his country under the Leadership of Juan Peron, after he was warned by the Peronists for insufficiently mourning the death of Evita and after he had decided that he would rather leave all he knew than live in a place where the government monitored mourning.

After my time as a lawyer in the Marines at Camp Pendleton concluded, I went to Argentina to find all that my grandfather loved about this magical place and to know him better after his passing. In the process, I also found all that he had fled, and I return to grieve the loss of one nation I love and to warn the other to take heed.

"Argentina is America 100 years ago and 100 years from now," my friend Morgan tells me as we look out at the Buenos Aires skyline. As I see what is happening in Washington with the IRS scandal, I fear he might only be wrong about the time frame. I told people sometimes I wouldn't mind being a freedom fighter, imprisoned by President Cristina Kirchner. "She won't imprison you; she'll send the tax board after you." I laughed at how darkly brilliant this was: a punishment of having to pay the government you so dislike.

This was well before the IRS' actions shocked so many Americans. I was pleasantly surprised by the response: It is recognized as part of life here. There was a widespread rumor that after an Argentine Harvard student questioned Cristina Kirchner about her re-election ambitions, his family was investigated by the tax bureau. It was widely believed for a reason.

The situation in Argentina is getting dire. The bizarre monetary policies have led to rampant inflation. A dollar went from being worth seven pesos to 10 pesos in just the time I was there.

The government alleges that there is no inflation and that five pesos are worth a dollar, but the government will not allow Argentines to pull dollars from ATMs or banks, so there is a brisk illegal trade on what is known as the "blue market."

Walking down the street with wads of hundred dollar bills in my boots, ducking into shady stores known as cuevas to trade with rough-looking men for pesos, I marvel at a nation where government policies force me and everyone else to be a criminal to get by.

The police officer stands on the corner outside and nods at me. There is no enforcement, of course, unless you become an enemy of the government. Then, all the laws you have broken to survive come crashing down on your head. Then you have to face the tax board. I move briskly away from the police officer outside the cueva.

I am probably safe from him. He must need dollars, too. It hurts me to think of how those who can't get them are surviving stuck in the prison of a dropping peso. On May 25, the government celebrated "a decade won." An image of Cristina and Nestor Kirchner embracing was placed all over the Plaza de Mayo with the bright caption: 10 years of love for others. Somehow, shrouding policies that lead to shocking unemployment, inflation and corruption in the mantle of humanitarianism has garnered the government support among those hurt the most by them: the ones whose children go to schools where they don't learn to read, the ones who cannot buy things because they weren't made in Argentina, or cannot get a job because they don't have friends in the government. She won re-election though, and despite a million protesting Argentines, myself among them, Congress just passed her court-packing plan to "democratize" the judiciary and to pave the way for her re-reelection attempt.

I am grateful for my grandfather's prescience to see all this in the time of Peron and flee so his family could have a better future. Like so many immigrants, he came to the U.S. seeking the freedom to work with his own hands in a land where government was limited. There is no difference in the natural endowment of Argentina and America: If you drive to Cordoba you would think you were in Kansas.

A hundred years ago. Argentina was the sixth-richest country in the world and the dilapidated palaces in the capital city stand as testament to that grand epoch. This could have been America. But it listened to a gifted orator who harnessed the power of celebrity to assert that a larger government would help more people. Decades later, the people suffer.

May America remember that today, so that, 100 years from now, we are not Argentina.

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